B-Bones: How to get access to individual segments?
This is a very late answer, I didn't see in until now and if somebody had answered it, I would not have jumped in, since I am struggling with the same issue myself. But I might be a baby step ahead of you, so I thought I should share: You'll want to use a spline-ik constraint on the last bone of your chain, set the chain length accordingly (the selected bone included), as in the manual:
 https://www.blender.org/manual/rigging/posing/inverse_kinematics/spline_ik.html 
You'll need a target curve. To control the curve you will need hooks, those can be bones, too, but whatever you do, don't use the same armature as the one controlling your bones because you will get strange effects: if you use bones as hooks, you'll need 2 armatures. I still need to work on the last part and I did have my trouble with tutorials, but I hope this was useful.